


Candlelight

by theKyra (orphan_account)



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Sorta kinda, also minor fix-its, oneshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 08:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/theKyra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mostly just one-shots that I will post as they come to mind. Will definitely be unedited (at least at first, I might go through and properly edit them later), and POV's will probably change between one-shots. Updates will come as the plotbunnies attack, and as I'm sure everyone knows, plotbunnies are unpredictable at best. ;)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reflection

So maybe a new age of darkness was not going to happen. He recognized this fact. The dark ages were long since past, and maybe he had far fewer believers these days. On the upside, he still had a few—particularly among the most sheltered of children. Children whose parents sought to protect them from everything bad about life... children who had never experienced fear or uncertainty, who would enter adulthood without a single clue about reality's harsh edges.

Maybe taking the world by force was not necessarily the best idea he'd ever had. That didn't mean he was wrong or that he had made a mistake (and it was a wonderful dream, perhaps one he would save for the future)—it simply meant that his perspective needed a bit of a shift. Pitch refused to admit that the Guardians were right, that the world had changed and left him behind, but he could accept that maybe it was time to take a slightly different look at things.

Of course, the first act of business—once he dealt with the nightmares and the damage they had caused him—would be a few visits to some of these sheltered children. They needed a good taste of fear, and who was he to deny them? And if he needed to corrupt the Sandman's dreams, then so be it. It _was_ his job, after all.

* * *

 

Two and a half weeks (and some cautiously re-tamed nightmares later)—barely a blink of the eyes when one was as old as he—he unintentionally found himself face to face with Jack Frost again. To be fair, he had expected Sandy to come after him, which was not altogether an encouraging thought, even if he was technically within his rights to corrupt his Dreamsand. Happening across the youngest (and to be honest, most insufferable) of the Guardians had really not been on his list of things to do, but then again, it was still early spring and he had learned centuries ago that Jack had a tendency to hang around far longer than necessary. Unfortunately.

"Hey, look what the cat dragged in!" Jack remarked in an amused tone as he hung in midair, watching Pitch from the relative safety of the air. "Though, I'll admit, I didn't expect to see you back at your... whatever it is you usually do... so soon."

"Hmm." Scowling at the boy frozen in eternal youth, Pitch didn't respond immediately, taking the time to properly consider his words. However, after a moment's thought, he replied coolly, "Never mind the fact that there are places more in want of snow than here. I could ask very much the same of you, Frost."

Jack shrugged, a cheerful grin crossing his face. That was almost surprising, given how quick he had been to lead the charge against him, but then, he was still a child at heart, very obviously and despite the centuries that had passed since Pitch had first become aware of his existence. And children were, if anything, quick to forgive and forget. Well, forget, at least. That, he had learned, seemed to be a skill that Jack possessed in much abundance. "So? I move fast. Stopping here is hardly a detour."

Amusing. Try being capable of going from one side of the planet to the other in a mere heartbeat. Well, in the time that it would normally take a heart to beat, given that dying and becoming immortal meant that he didn't actually have a proper, working heart anymore. He hardly needed one, being as he had no blood to spill. "Which begs the question of why you stopped in a small city well away from your typical haunts," Pitch drawled, feigning interest in one of his hands for several moments before he glanced back up and added, "Either way, I have better things to do than stand here talking to a child."

"I'm not a child," Jack objected immediately, his tone going from pleasantly cheerful to biting in a flash.

"Yes, you are," he said flatly. "Do keep in mind that I'm many hundreds of years older than you are, Frost. Now, shoo. I have work to do, and unlike _you_ , I don't take 'detours.'"

"Work?" Jack scoffed, conveniently ignoring the remark about age and the jab at his idea of a detour. "Since when do you do anything that doesn't directly benefit you?"

Pitch sighed, a deeply exasperated sound. Clearly, it had been too long since he had last dealt with a child (or childish immortal, in this case) outside of dreams and nightmares. He'd forgotten how single-minded they could be when they were intent upon a single idea. "All immortals have a purpose, do we not?" he replied wearily. "Some of us just aren't _applauded_ for doing our jobs. You're a spirit of winter, are you not? Can you honestly say that winter has no negatives? That winter has never killed?"

Jack paused, and after the briefest of moments, a faintly horrified expression crossed his face before being hurriedly masked with careful neutrality. Inwardly, Pitch was deeply amused—clearly, he had struck a chord—but outwardly he only smirked at the young immortal. "Oh dear, have I discovered a particular worry of yours?"

"None of your business," Jack retorted sharply.

Of course, that was utter nonsense. Fear, worry, anxiety—all  things that were _exactly_ his business. Nightmares were about more than just fear, after all. "Ah, but it is," he replied mildly, a new thought coming to mind. If an immortal looked like a child, acted like a child, and evidently thought like a child, then it logically followed that said immortal had died young in his prior life. Had Jack Frost, spirit of winter, _died_ in winter? Well, well. There was an interesting thought... and one he could easily confirm with a little poking around at the Tooth Palace. "Regardless, neither of us have perfectly ideal work to do. I have the dull tedium of dealing with the likes of you, and you get to fret over the consequences of your powers." Pitch paused for a moment, then smirked again and added, "I suppose I'll leave you to it."

Without waiting for a response, he disappeared back into the shadows, unconsciously returning to his dim domain beneath the Earth's surface. He still had places to go—specifically, cities all over North America that were full of dreadfully sheltered children, but first... first he wanted to discover whether his hunch about Jack Frost was correct. The Man in the Moon would never say, even if he asked, and he knew that, but he knew precisely where to find the memories of a particular immortal's past life...


	2. Frost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose always blamed herself for Jack's death, but he never did, forever continuing to protect her and her family out of an inexplicable attachment that he never quite understood before his memories were returned to him.

Rose was eleven the year that they lost Jack. That winter was forever seared into the town's collective memory as the longest, coldest winter the town had seen in years, but to her, it was always the winter that she lost her best friend and protector, and it was all her fault. All winter, she was kept indoors, deemed too young and too small to go out, lest she fall ill or disappear into the snow like Jack had disappeared into the water. As a result, she saw little of the true extent of the snow and the cold, but she clearly remembered the delicate patterns of frost that decorated the windows of the house that winter. And, on the one night she was permitted to go out long enough to visit some of  her friends, she would have sworn she had heard Jack's laugh in the trees that surrounded their small town.

When she was fourteen, finally allowed to leave the house during the colder months, Rose spent as many afternoons by the lake as she could. Never again would she dare to step out onto the ice, but she sat by the lake's shore all winter, imagining that Jack sat there beside her, like they had sat by the hearth in winters past.

Rose was nineteen when, without any warning at all, winter struck early. What few crops had not been harvested were lost, and many of the smallest children and oldest family elders fell prey to illness that year. Rose herself fell ill late that winter, but the weather abruptly warmed for several weeks shortly thereafter, almost as if the weather wished that she lived to see the spring, and she did.

At twenty-four, Rose had two children of her own, whom she firmly told to never go near the lake, even though the older one was no more than three and a half years old. That winter, the winds screamed and travelers who passed through spoke of a new story, that of a boy who remained forever young and brought winter wherever he went. They described how he was only ever seen in glimpses, flashes of snow-white hair and icy blue eyes, how his laughter could sometimes be heard when children threw snowballs at one another, how the winds echoed with his voice. They never mentioned a name associated with this spirit of winter, and so Rose took little notice of the stories...

...until the following winter, when one of her two boys wandered away into a blizzard and was thought lost until a hunter found him that evening by the very same lake Rose had once sat vigil by. Her son, only a few months shy of five years of age, never gave any explanation for his disappearance or his miraculous discovery, aside from one simple sentence that shook her to the core: "Jack found me, he brought me home when I was lost."

Within the year, the stories came back around, changed by another two years of telling. This time, Rose listened closely, even though she was twenty-six years old and certainly too old for fairy tales. She heard tales of a Jack Frost who brought the winds and snow, who froze the crops and brought starvation to ill-prepared towns, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands. But she also heard of the Jack Frost who played with children and never allowed them to come to harm, who brought joy in a dreary season, who spoke with the wind and walked among the trees. It was this image of a benevolent winter spirit who protected children during the cold months that Rose chose to believe in. Though she never shared the thought with anyone else--not her parents, not her husband, and certainly not her children--Rose never again doubted that Jack had truly saved her son, as he had saved her.

Until she died at the remarkable age of seventy-six, Rose never stopped believing, never stopped hoping that one day she might see her beloved brother again. Her children were grown and with children of their own, and her husband had died many years ago, but still Rose clung to life, to her last remaining hope. It was in early December, almost exactly sixty-five years to the day since she had lost Jack to the icy waters that took him from her, that a white-haired boy with eyes of striking blue appeared by her window. He looked nothing like her brother and yet she recognized him immediately, his face identical to the cheerful and kind brother she had lost so long ago.

He smiled cheerfully at her through the window, and then disappeared as quickly as he had come, the only sign of his presence being the fern-shaped patterns of frost that slowly spread over the window.

Rose died peacefully in her sleep that night, finally at peace with the loss of her brother, a death she had blamed on herself for most of her life. Forever engraved on her tombstone was the very same year that the American colonies declared their independence, and her headstone stood tall and proud in the Overland family plot, centered between the headstones of one Jackson Overland and her husband, William. It was these three headstones, long since reduced to illegibility and broken fragments by the passage of time, that a white-haired youth with bright blue eyes left coated in frost before he turned away and allowed the wind to carry him home, back to the lake that had called to him for over three hundred years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone else was calling his sister Rose, so hey, why not jump on that bandwagon? Haha. I have a few more oneshots in progress, so expect to see a few more of these popping up this week. (Finals? Pfah, what finals?)

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, comments are appreciated. So if I'm horribly out of character, very well in character, boring, good, bad, whatever, let me know? :)


End file.
